Wounded Warrior
IN PRODUCTION
Tina Garnanez grew up New Mexico with her mother, four brothers, and an alcoholic father. Tina wanted to go to college, but like many Navajo, her family was poor. The army offered her hope, a chance to get an education, a chance to have a career. Shortly before her scheduled discharge, she was unexpectedly deployed to Iraq as a combat medic. Those five months changed her forever.
Tina is by nature an optimist but when she returned home, she could not sleep, had flashbacks of the horrors she’d witnessed, and she had frequent rage attacks, frightening herself and those around her. She spoke against the war, and her restlessness propelled her from one living space to another, from one relationship to the next. The only constant was her scrapbook where she compulsively and very creatively stores her memories, not to lose her mind.
The concept for the film began in 2006 as a longitudinal portrait of Tina post-Iraq: a 22-year-old woman contorted with war pain, one foot in the modern world and another in the traditions of Navajo culture. How will she chart her path?
Tina’s emotional changes are accompanied by frequent physical changes. She shaves her head in solidarity with the Dalai Lama. She wears cowboy hats in one period, scarves in another. Her hair grows, changes color and is cut again. She gets a tattoo and multiple piercings.
In less than four years, Tina moves at least ten times, has four – and loses three - girlfriends, and several jobs. She needs to go home to her loving and caring mother and brothers – and then she feels compelled to leave them again! She visits her grandmother, Daisy, her hero and her rock, on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. On the dry but rich land, with the sheep and the goats, Tina’s soul finds rest, if only for a short while.
She agrees to attend a meeting of The Wounded Warriors Healing Circle, in Warm Springs, Oregon. Here veterans – mainly from the Vietnam War – meet in an atmosphere of love, pain, humor, and openness, and share their stories. Warily, Tina allows herself to step in among them. She sees herself in the eyes of these elder men and women, and they urge her to accept herself as a war veteran, and seek help to deal with her demons now, or they will come back to haunt her.
Moving to Santa Fe, Tina enrolls in the Institute of Indian American Arts (IAIA). Life is good. But her PTSD again rears its ugly head. Her relationship with Kim is getting too difficult for Tina to handle. Kim kicks her out. By December 2008, Tina is homeless again, sleeping in her car.
But this time she does not run away. For the first time in her life she finds her own apartment, and moves in with her things, her scrapbooks and her dog. She stays in college determined to graduate.
By the end of the film, Tina and her demons have settled into a reluctant dance. She lives with Marica in a steady and happy relationship in Santa Fe. She is unfolding her creativity and continue to use art as a healing tool at the Institute of Indian American Arts. She visits grandma Daisy more often and begins to learn the Navajo language for the first time!
As Tina learns to better cope with her PTSD, even though it remains a constant struggle, she is picturing herself with a future, as an art-therapist working with native war veterans.